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If there was a magical duplicator ray, governments would want to heavily regulate its use. A few million extra bodies would completely crash an economy, but mig

If there was a magical duplicator ray, governments would want to heavily regulate its use. A few million extra bodies would completely crash an economy, but might be good if you wanted to fight a war. I do think the duplicator ray is a great analogy. There would be a lot of tricky moral questions raised if such a technology existed. On the topic of a human mind in a computer, i dont think they should be afforded property rights either. If you can copy them into 10 bodies, and each one can own a house, then they are taking real resources from actual humans. This extends to owning other things too.

_zywo 5y ago
> then they are taking real resources from actual humans. But who is "they"? If you copied them 10 times, it's not like they act as a collective; there are 10 unique instances having unique experiences. What's wrong with 10 different people each owning a house?
- krageon 5y ago
  "they" refers to the collective other: Something that is vaguely understood as not being like you, without having a clear definition. It is a linguistic way to alienate something so it becomes okay to treat it poorly without inconvenient feelings of guilt.
  - RugnirViking 5y ago
    people are trying to explain this to themselves because they are imagining the future where some rich guy has a hundred thousand copies of himself working on the same problem because he can afford all of that space and power, compunding ever more the already tricky problem of "you have to have money to make money". Imagine if you had to singlehandedly compete with the productive output of a small nation to even stand a chance of competing...
d110af5ccf 5y ago
> copy them into 10 bodies > taking real resources from actual humans I suspect these statements are contradictory. What is an "actual human", anyway? Next you'll be trying to tell me that entities without souls don't need rights. How do we detect souls? Well, you kind of just know.

_zywo 5y ago

> then they are taking real resources from actual humans. But who is "they"? If you copied them 10 times, it's not like they act as a collective; there are 10 unique instances having unique experiences. What's wrong with 10 different people each owning a house?

krageon 5y ago
"they" refers to the collective other: Something that is vaguely understood as not being like you, without having a clear definition. It is a linguistic way to alienate something so it becomes okay to treat it poorly without inconvenient feelings of guilt.
- RugnirViking 5y ago
  people are trying to explain this to themselves because they are imagining the future where some rich guy has a hundred thousand copies of himself working on the same problem because he can afford all of that space and power, compunding ever more the already tricky problem of "you have to have money to make money". Imagine if you had to singlehandedly compete with the productive output of a small nation to even stand a chance of competing...

d110af5ccf 5y ago

> copy them into 10 bodies > taking real resources from actual humans I suspect these statements are contradictory. What is an "actual human", anyway? Next you'll be trying to tell me that entities without souls don't need rights. How do we detect souls? Well, you kind of just know.